It was long overdue, but I finally made the trip to Ireland to visit Erin. We've known each other since middle school. Over 17 years. I feel like I've lived so many lives since then -- new cities, new scenes, new sets of friends. There's something very comforting about being around your oldest friends, even in a foreign country.

After finding a team of horses on a hill, we grabbed Aoife, a folk musician and Erin's roommate. We drove a rented Ford Fiesta through the night and across the country, singing The Cranberries and Sinead O'Connor (Ireland's finest), finally arriving at Martin's house in County Clare. Martin is Aoife's dad and traditional Irish flutemaker. I fell asleep that night to their fiddling and fluting in the kitchen. The next day we hopped the fence so the back entrance of the Cliffs of Moher. The sea hid behind the fog. The grass was lush and green and exactly what I pictured of Ireland in my cliched imagination. The day was another one of those dreamlike experiences that I hope for on every trip.

We started at the Brooklyn waterfront just hours before the storm was to make landfall. A brave few hopped police barriers to see how powerful the winds would be on a pier in the middle of the East River. But walking across the Williamsburg Bridge in the middle of the storm was really experiencing the power of nature. You could feel the bridge ripple in the wind. We ventured back out the morning after the floods. Manhattanites were leaving in exodus. The bridge was more crowded than I'd ever seen it. At night, it was even more surreal. A city that never sleeps was abruptly put down -- no power below 34th Street.

We rode through canyons of darkness as these monolithic buildings carved out black rectangles against the sky. There were signs of life here and there but mostly just the headlights of cars navigating the dark streets without traffic lights. After four days, the power was restored last night. New York City is slowly returning to normal, but the unfortunate residents along Jersey's shore, Staten Island, Red Hook, and Rockaway have a long way to go. -Bryan Derballa

I'm mixing two different sets of photos here--each terrifying in their own right. The first is from a couple years ago, when I found myself in an abandoned church in Brooklyn in the middle of the night with some friends. We found these creepy rooms upstairs and spooked the hell out of ourselves. If I wasn't with friends, it would have been downright horrifying. More recently, I had an assignment to shoot a torture-style haunted house called Blackout. This time I was alone. No friends. Just a naked ballerina, disease-ridden whore, and other menacing characters. Sweet nightmares. -Bryan Derballa

Magician and endurance performer David Blaine decided to stand on a small platform in the middle of seven Tesla coils firing bolts of electricity at him with no food or sleep for 73 hours.

I jumped on the project and started shooting the tests in an old maritime warehouse that used to house the Autumn Bowl. Then we moved to a pier in Chelsea to stage the event. It was a lot of work and a lot of electricity, but David survived and so did I. This is what I've got to show for it. -Bryan Derballa

Again with the backstage and runways. I shot another season of Fashion Week for New York Times T Magazine and was house photographer for J. Crew and Derek Lam. It was another week of trying not to be noticed by anyone, while trying to notice everything. -Bryan Derballa

During SXSW last spring, I holed up at the FADER Fort shooting all the performances for the first three days. At some point during the War on Drugs, the shutter in one of my cameras died. I plugged it into the computer and found out that I'd taken 550,000 photos in the three years I've owned it. That's a lot of photos, but I'm happy to have a handful of good ones. -Bryan Derballa

I somehow stumbled into shooting a fashion editorial for Vice called Doggy District. It's basically dogs in compromising environments -- crack alley, strip club, S&M dungeon. Annette Lamothe-Ramos came up with the concept and wrangled the puppies. It was her Italian greyhound Finn Danzig that ended up the cover.

Asher Levine designed the outfits including the puppy fleshlight. Kristof Wickman and Danny Durtsche built the sets. All I did was snap the pictures. All the dogs did was run around like animals. Especially the bartender who kept hopping over the bar to attack the strippers. We had fun and they had fun. I think. -Bryan Derballa

There's a lot of beeps and lights. I don't care much for beeps but I like to photograph lights. I shot a couple of the events for The Creators Project in Brooklyn and SF. It's an interesting collision of technology, art, and music. As far as tragically hip events go, this is one of my favorites. Bryan Derballa

This time last year, in the middle of one of New York's snowiest winters, I boarded a plane to Brazil to work on a project with my good friend Cameron, who after two years in the Peace Corps in Mozambique was fluent in Portuguese. The project was about people living along the Amazon River. This is not that project, but rather the moments in between, the friends we made, the shit we jumped off of.

We knew the Amazon River had its share of dangers -- piranhas, cayman, anacondas, stingrays, fish that can swim up your urethra. But it was so hot all the time and the water was so inviting. And none of the people we met seemed to warn against it. On the last night of staying with a family in the floodplains, we asked the patriarch, a grizzled fisherman with a big belly and toothless smile that grew up on the river, if he was ever afraid of getting in the water. He said every time, and proceeded to show us a hole in his thigh courtesy of a stingray. Then the whole family laughed at us for our recreational use of the Amazon River.

I shot a campaign that trolled through a few cities last month. These are the after-hours photos. In Miami we got a glimpse of Art Basel. Then stopped off at the aquarium in Boston. Spent most of our time in Austin at the Whole Foods. Blew through SF only slowing down to catch the sunset. And bombed hills in Echo Park in a minivan. -Bryan Derballa

Lost in the cornstalks. Chased by masked men picking up extra work at harvest time. Brandishing a plastic sword and a chainsaw missing its chain. A deranged clown refusing to break character. Gripping fear, tightening chest. New Jersey is where I came to die.

I don't always carry a camera around like I used to. Sometimes it's nice to leave it at home. But it's increasingly rare that I'll have odds and ends photos that come from having a camera on hand at just the right moment. Most of what I shoot now is for projects, series, and assignments. Those occasional flashes of inspiration that used to make up the majority of this blog now get tucked away onto hard drives, hidden amidst the terabytes of assigned work. This week it's officially summer, so I thought I'd dig through the archives and see what I'd forgotten. These are salvaged from the summer of 2010. -Bryan Derballa

The whole purpose of my trip to New Zealand was to photograph veteran surfer Cory Lopez and his experience at the Cold Water Classic for Huck Magazine. Professional surfing is one of those dream jobs -- traveling eight months a year to the most beautiful places in the world only to spend the whole day on the beach. I tried go deeper and demystify the experience. But all in all, it's pretty damn good living.

My first night in New Zealand I walked down to the beach. While sitting in the sand taking arty, self-indulgent photos of crashing waves, I realized how long it had been since I'd seen stars, and that there were so goddamned many. Nine years earlier I had the same realization, also in New Zealand, laying in a field amazed at the infinite nature of the universe. I studied abroad there in 2002, my first trip out of America. Then last March, Huck Magazine sent me back to photograph surfers at New Zealand's first pro contest. I did that but those photos are for another day. These pictures are the result of the week after the contest. A week that I spent trying to relive my first visit to New Zealand. Alone, with little more than my nostalgia, independence, and a $10 sleeping bag, I set off in a rental car looking for swimming holes, skateparks, and that feeling of the unknown, fraught with possibility, that New Zealand will always represent to me. -Bryan Derballa

I've always wanted to go to India. Then I did...for three days. Can't quite cross it off the bucket list, but it was a good glimpse into the country from the cricket pitch. To put together a lookbook for NIke, I traveled to Dheli and Mumbai to shoot two players from India's National Cricket Team -- a young batter named Virat Kholi and a veteran bowler named Zaheer Khan. Both rad guys, which made it all the better that they won the Cricket World Cup two weeks ago. Couldn't be more stoked for the team and look forward to getting back for a more extensive visit.

XXCOMMUNICATED Saturday, 22 January 2011 /// Written by Bryan Derballa

It was 4AM and the streets of Philadelphia were wet and shiny. One of the guys in the entourage started skitching on the side of old-ass limo, the kind with the boomerang attached the trunk, when a middle finger presented itself from out the window. Certainly one of the more brilliant things I've seen at that hour.

It was either a roadie or a townie, but he bet me $100 that I couldn't kickflip on his longboard. The board was about as long as a car bumper and the wet griptape was slicker than a seal. But through sheer force I pulled it off. Of course I didn't get the $100. But I think I did earn the respect of Jamie Smith from The XX who I'd been photographing for my first feature for The FADER. It was our last few minutes hanging out, after days of slinking through greenrooms and backstage of theaters. Going into this, I knew two things about Jamie -- that he was a musical genius and that he was notoriously quiet. Talking with him, I learned that he was a skateboarder. We bro'ed down over that and Jamie let me do my thing.

But still, having some creepy dude (me) follow you through the innards of a theater or the afterhours club with a camera always dangling from his neck doesn't really have a calming effect. At least until my kickflip. Then wading through the soggy streets to the tour bus, I finally felt like one of the gang. Even if I didn't take any more pictures, I knew I could and it would be alright. Even if it couldn't change the content of the photos I already shot, it did change what they mean to me. This is my friend of a few days, Jamie XX, and this is his story.

I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...

I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.

It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.

I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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